My Animated Life

Release Date: April 2011

YORAM GROSSYoram Gross’ recollections of his life told simply and directly, cannot be read without emotion. This is the story of a youth who was forced to grow up during the Nazi occupation of his country, Poland. Although he saw death all around him, he reached out to life. Despite the surrounding horrors, the book is surprisingly cheerful. How it was possible for the author to carry from this wartime Hell an enduring faith in humanity is his great personal victory.

“Sometimes one is, however stupidly, tempted to think that every extraordinary Holocaust story has been told. The truth is that the last tale will not even have been written when the last survivor has passed from the earth. For the Holocaust generated an infinite variety of tortures and personal crises. Yoram Gross’ short, vivid book has its own force – it combines all the brio of youth with all the unjust and knife-edge perils of being a young Jewish man hiding out and on the run. Gross’ later life, prefigured in his World War II experience, is another testimony to the wealth of talent that the Third Reich obliterated, the talent which in most cases was stolen out of the world, but which in his case, managed to survive. You will be engrossed by this book.” Thomas Keneally

Born in 1926 in Krakow, Yoram (Jerzy) Gross is a screenwriter, film director and producer. He began his career in film in Lodz in 1947. In 1950 he left Poland for Israel where he made newsreels, documentaries and experimental animated films. His Joseph the Dreamer was Israel’s first full-length animated feature. In 1968 he migrated to Australia, where he created such animated classics as Dot and the Kangaroo and Blinky Bill.